Need for customer centricity

Today‚Äôs competitive market is reducing margins and driving enterprises from customer acquisition to customer retention approach. The need of the hour is customer centricity, to create products around customer needs.

Telecom service providers, unlike online industries like Amazon, Apple, Google and eBay, store customer data in silos due to the inherent complexities in the service portfolio. This in turn impedes 360 degree view of the customer and adversely impacts customer loyalty.

“There were 5 exabytes of information created between the dawn of civilization through 2003, but that much information is now created every 2 days, and the pace is increasing ‚Ä¶”

Eric Schmidt, Google CEO, at Techonomy Conference 2010

The first step towards customer centricity is to break these silos and transform them to a unified platform that gives a 360 degree view of customer data and then pool all customer data into a central warehouse that maps different lines of businesses to a customer.

“The teams merged but the systems didn’t, so from the outside it looks like a merged company, but from the inside we see a mobile customer, a TV customer, an Internet customer, but sometimes they can all be the same person.”

The second step is to use this unified platform to deliver customer knowledge that will be used by marketing to send relevant offers for up-sell and cross-sell. Further, you will have to move into interactive operations by identifying customers (based on daily usage)who are prone to move to another operator. These customers are given personalized and relevant offers to retain them. The final step is to align all departments in using the consolidated customer data in their day to day operations to provide a superior customer experience.

Customer centricity is not about replacing your existing systems, but it is simply a realignment of your processes for business agility and operational efficiency.